Kwayver - short answer, yes. Long answer, it depends (reference Podima and Fierss).

Item upgrading is no better, nor worse, than gemming or enchanting. Is item X worth using top end gems/enchants if item Y is better? What's my short-/long-term chance of getting Y? What's the current price of gems/enchants/etc? Example: do you put Dancing Steel on an LFR item, or use the less powerful Windsong? Dancing Steel is definitively better, but you may settle for cheaper based on your personal financial evaluation (I would!).

Yes, upgrading a weapon should be greater bang for the buck than upgrading any other single piece of gear. Whether you choose to upgrade a Normal weapon (or even an LFR) is a personal decision. You must decide the complex answer to: How close are you to a better weapon? Speed of your progression (many bosses between you and the upgrade?), chance of drop (including competition between other raiders who want the same drop), and even overall hardcore-ness of your raid group are all factors.

What's a mess is updating tools to function with the various levels of gear. We've gone from 1 item, to 3-5 (LFR, Normal, Elite, Heroic, Heroic Elite) to 9-15 (LFR 0/2, Normal 0/2, Elite 0/2, Heroic 0/2, Heroic Elite 0/2, and all their 1/2 and 2/2 variations). Say you have a 489 item you've upgraded twice (497, now) and a 496 drops. Do you now sit on this because your 497 is marginally better until you can afford to upgrade the 496? Shouldn't you sit on the 496 until dead last, since upgrading anything else gets 4/8 ilevels and upgrading this only nets you 3/7 more than the other item? But if it's a weapon, 3 ilvls on weapon are probably better than 4 on another item. Spending Valor points is a pretty heavy investment into an item. Two upgrades is literally a week and a half of effort, due to the cap.

At 1k Valor a week it would take 22.5 weeks to upgrade all 15 gear slots we use. That's 5.625 months. Get unlucky with drops and you could conceivably hit Valor cap with nothing new to upgrade, 'wasting' time and stretching this out further. If you're not ultra high-end raiders you could have the necessity to upgrade Normal mode (to avoid hitting valor cap or to help your raid progress by wearing improved gear), then start to earn Heroic gear and want to update that, too. So middle-of-the-road raiders would take longer than 6 months to upgrade a tier's worth of gear (does a Tier even last 6 months, unless it's the last of the X-pac?).

Just jumping in to the fray here, pardon me.

I read earlier in this thread that the theoretical DPS difference between Holy Avenger, Avenging Wrath and Divine Purpose was around 2k dps with full BiS and all that jazz. Specifically I believe the numbers were around 100k dps and Divine Purpose took the rear with about 98k.

My question is: Of course actually going for the top DPS talent is the way forward, but isn't Divine Purpose quite advantageous anyway? My thinking is that to achieve that top theoretical dps you need to be pretty awesome at the rotation with the cooldowns, particularly when discussing holy avenger, but I'm assuming that it's similar for Avenging Wrath.

Furthermore Divine Purpose, over the span of a fight will provide a steady dps and not just the insane burst and then flatline.

It's very few fights where you can have complete control over your rotations and use them efficiently. Either through phase changes, movements, add killings and much more you seem to very rarely be in a spot where you can just guarantee 30 seconds of constant dps.

I'm just trying to understand it here, because I like Divine Purpose and would just want to hear what you guys have to say about it, I can live with it being a minor dps loss in a therotical sense, but perhaps I'm missing something here. Help a guy out.

What you should take from the 90 talents is that they're all reasonably close, DP a bit back of the others. If the fight allows efficient use of cooldowns, or if the on demand burst is important to beat a mechanic, then you certainly want SW or HA. If the fight does not meet those conditions, DP may even pull ahead. Which fights those might be could depend on whether you have 4pc and your raid's level of dps and/or strategy. The rotations are not at all difficult, though SW may take a bit of practice if you haven't tried it before. HA is really, really easy. You cast TV every other spell.

The point about finding 30 seconds to constantly dps is confusing to me. There are very few spots in the current tier where this is an issue. Will if you aren't a strength tank or full-time boss dps, Vizier during mind control phase, and Tsulong day phase are the only ones i see cooldowns as problematic. Will may well favor DP, Vizier the issue is insignificant overall, and the gaps in the fight favor SW/HA, and Tsulong I haven't done on my paladin yet but i'm thinking i'll be running HA for boss healing.

edit: I forgot about the damage buff on Will during gas phase, which makes DP a bad choice.

The issue though is that you have the posibility of stacking cd's when you use HA or SW, with things like mogu power and hero/bloodlust increasing their benefit compared to DP, and as mentioned above most of the fights have long enough steady intervals where we can use our cd's effectively during the encounter.

On a side note, does someone know if simulationcraft take into account item upgrades when importing from the armory?

Where in the string do we add that? After enchants? Immediately after item id number?

At the end works.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm still not sure I understand why having MORE burst, when we are already so amazing at it with GoAK and AW makes sense to pick over a talent like DP. Is it because stacking all the cooldowns somehow enhances them all exponentially?

I think there's quite a few add phases in this tier, and my concern would be to hold off my cooldowns (eg: 5 minute fight, you can only benefit from 1 AW w/o 4 piece, but you get an additional 2 minutes of DP?)

I guess I'm ultimately just confused as all hell. Thanks for helping me out!

Ah, awesome man. Now I get it. My final question is, am I right in assuming that HA will be better than SW until 4 pc, and at 4pc SW would pull ahead?

Fiers and I have discussed this at length and he mentioned his conclusion a couple posts ago. 502 Starshatter is superior. Yes, even later with the 550 legendary gem.

The answer to this and any gear question is "sim for yourself." However, I simmed it, Fiers simmed it, and we came up with Starshatter conclusively ahead every way we ran it. I disbelieved this at first, because I thought the legendary gem should pull Shinka ahead, but when I sanity checked it, it made sense. Weapon DPS is extremely powerful. Just to illustrate this point, let's compare wdps and strength...

• 502 starshatter has 1294 str and 4725 wdps.
• 496 gemmed Shinka has 1723 str and 4468 wdps.

502 Starshatter is a loss of 429 str and a gain of 257 wdps. However, my str and wdps weights are 2.91 and 6.18 apiece -- weapon DPS is well over twice as powerful as strength. Starshatter is the winner.

Now doing the same napkin math with double-upgrades and assuming we have the 550 str legendary gem later...

• 510 Starshatter has 1394 str and 5090 wdps.
• 504 gemmed Shinka has 1867 str and 4813 wdps

Starshatter represents a loss of 473 str and a gain of 277 wdps. It's still stronger.

Obviously this leaves out any consideration of the secondary stats and so it's an incomplete explanation. I was not trying to esimate DPS, I'm just explaining why the higher ilvl weapon pulls ahead of the one with more strength.

To get a better look at the value of each weapon, you'll need to assign values for secondary stats; really to get a better look you'd need to sim it. However, the results don't change. Starshatter is still more valuable. Possibly because it is a higher ilvl weapon and thus represents more total secondary stats, and because neither weapon is itemized for haste. But the weapon DPS part is the most important part.... I will note for an example that I personally am 717 expertise over the cap because I have expertise coming out my ass and I can't get rid of it to save my life. I currently waste a full 717 expertise rating off Starshatter and it still sims ahead, the 502 version sims ahead of a 500 ShinKa which I have because I spent my valor very poorly last week. Point being... it's plain better. Also, it is a much more attractive weapon and matches my hair.

Hope that helped.

I'd suggest simming it for yourself, as I'd imagine other posters would, but I've found this to be the case. I've used HA on just about every encounter so far this tier. It has worked well for me, and simcraft supports my decision.

I discovered an error in my settings regarding talents, which was partially responsible for my results showing HA > SW. After fixing the error, I see HA and SW within ~50 dps of each other, with 101178 and 101232 dps respectively (This is with a fight duration of 400s. DP trails behind at 100223 dps). Results will be heavily influenced by fight duration and Simcraft cooldown priority settings. I have more testing to do before I'm confident in what it's telling me.


Related question (are simcraft related questions appropriate for this thread? If not, my apologies): Is Simcraft properly prioritizing cooldowns? Particularly when looking at fight duration. When I look through the settings on the Simulate tab, for how it determines what cooldowns to use and when, I'm a little confused.

Looking through simcraft's settings, it doesn't follow the priority I would (examples in the next section). It looks like it says (as long as inquisition is up and heroism isn't being used):
Use GoAK if AW's CD will be up within 10 seconds.
Hold AW til you get a trinket proc (same for either lei shin or darkmist, not sure about others), unless GoAK is ramping up.
Use HA as soon as it comes up, unless GoAK is ramping up.

It looks like unless all 3 cooldowns come up at almost the exact same time, simcraft will just fire off HA on cooldown, rather than any intelligent delaying to benefit from AW or GoAK or trinket procs. That would seem to artificially lower HA's efficacy.

In theory:
In a 350 second fight, it should be using GoAK, then 10s later HA + AW. HA at 130s, and then GoAK at 300s, HA+AW at 310s.
In a 400 second fight, it should be using GoAK, then 10s later HA + AW. HA at 130s, AW at 190s, HA at 250s, and then GoAK at 360s, HA+AW at 370s.
And arguably you can use a cooldown when a trinket procs, rather than waiting to line it up with another cooldown.

It seems to me like simcraft is using HA improperly.